'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ALMEIDA'S CHRISTMAS:
A Tony's Angels Christmas Tale
"No, youuuuuuuuu, Mommy," Nalda whined on behalf of the three-pack of four-year-old clones, tugging a wadded-up handful of her mother's skirt.
"I told you, honey, I'm busy," Michelle gently replied, engrossed in meticulously hanging Christmas balls on the bare, unfinished midsection of the tree, careful not to commit the egregious crime of hanging an ornament below the sacred cut-off line, which began at the highest branch that the triplets were able reach on their tip-toes. From that point downward was their area to adorn, and dazzle Santa Claus with, except for the last three rows of branches, exclusively reserved for their two-year-old sister. "Daddy will tell you a story while I finish the tree. Go ask Daddy," she repeated for the third time, eager to have him assume his annual, laborious assignment of trying to tucker them out for the evening.
"Nooooooo," Georgia chimed in with the same whiny tone of dissension. "He always changes things, Mommy," she bitterly complained.
"What do you mean, 'changes'?" Michelle frowned, her mind consumed with the overload of wrapping she had to do downstairs, provided Tony was even able to successfully capture their attention long enough for her to slip away unnoticed.
"He makes Rudolph's nose green," Laura joined in with a whimper. "And Santa falls down the chimney into the fire and gets second-agree burns, and... "
"...and he has to go to the emergency room," Nalda added with a disheartened pout, her eyes showing signs of weepiness at the prospect of being subjected to another of her father's grossly distorted versions of reality.
"And only the boys get toys 'cause Santa can't finish," Georgia completed the bastardized saga in a quavering voice, "'cause he has to go to the burnt unit..."
Michelle's head snapped toward the opposite side of the room, catching her husband snickering to himself as he turned his back to her, resuming the task of instructing their youngest in the fine art of untangling a string of lights.
"Did you tell them that?" she asked with a firm frown.
"I don't recall," he mumbled over his shoulder after thinking about it for a minute, fighting to keep himself from laughing and consequently raising her miff level higher than it already was. "C'mere... Leave your mother alone. She's busy," he said, turning his attention to the brooding pack and waving them over to him. "C'mere... I'll tell ya a real story. Whaddaya wanna hear? The one when I spent Christmas Eve in a tree with the sniper division?"
"Mommeeeeeeeee," Laura all but burst into tears.
"Tell them a nice story," Michelle reprimanded him with a stern tsk. "They're little girls, for Pete's sake. They don't want to hear about guns and shooting. Especially not on Christmas Eve."
"I'm afraid I don't know any nice stories," he taunted onward. "Marines don't deal in 'nice,' Michelle..."
"Just...just tell them something age-appropriate," she insisted, shooting him a look to remind him of all the outstanding chores they both had to do before crawling into bed that night, least of which was the assembly of three Barbie bikes, replete with training wheels, and a My Little Pony tricycle.
"Daddy, say, umm... Daddy, say the, umm... baby one, Daddy," Riley requested in her tiny voice.
"Y'mean, the Christmas Eve when you were just a baby, and your mother abandoned me?" he innocently inquired, feeling no need to glance at Michelle to see if her eyes were rolling around in her head. He could hear them.
"Yeth!" Riley excitedly replied, waiting patiently for him to stretch out on the floor, with his head crooked uncomfortably against the couch, before jumping on top of his stomach.
"What does 'bandoned' mean," Nalda brooded, slowly and warily approaching with her sisters in tow.
"It's when one person leaves the other person alone to fend for himself with an infant and two-year-old triplets while she meets an old boyfriend for a drink," he matter-of-factly stated.
"He wasn't an old boyfriend and I didn't have a drink with him," Michelle corrected the record.
"You two had coffee together," he tersely reminded her, knowing how much it inwardly delighted her whenever he'd display even a glimmer of jealousy. It was one of his Christmas presents to her.
"Accepting an extra cup of coffee originally intended for his wife, while trapped in a shopping mall elevator with four other people for twenty-five minutes, does not constitute having a drink," she gently reminded him, suppressing a smile as she returned her attention to the tree. "Nor does a former Quantico classmate qualify as an old boyfriend..." she giggled.
"Uh-huh," he replied in a thoroughly unconvinced tone, waiting while one of The Pack dutifully fetched a couch pillow to park behind his already aching neck.
"Did I tell ya the one about the time Santa caught Mrs. Claus out painting the town red with her girlfriends, while her poor husband..."
"Mommy, make him tell a real story," Nalda brooded, finding him not the least bit amusing.
"I have a ton of, umm... laundry to fold downstairs," Michelle gently ahem-ed him, employing the international parental high-sign language, "and I'd love to get through it without any... news flashes of what's going on up here..."
"Fine, fine," he begrudgingly acquiesced. "I'll stick to the facts... Go on," he assured her, watching Nalda's face illuminate with victory as Michelle made an exit from the room.
"Okay, so, uhh... so where were we..."
"The one of the baby," Riley enthusiastically repeated, punctuating her excitement with an energetic bounce of her body, full-force, against his stomach muscles.
"That story wasn't real. Mommy just said so," one of her older sisters quickly and snidely corrected her, compelling a wounded, confused frown to burrow into the two-year-old's brow.
"The part about being left alone with you critters was real," their father interjected, "but you've already heard that story. How 'bout I tell ya the one about..."
His voice trailed off as he paused to think, shifting his focus back and forth between the ceiling, which needed painting, he mentally noted, and the skeptical faces patiently staring at him, like angelic statues carved out of ice.
"How 'bout the time Santa's sleigh accidentally entered restricted air space over Washington, and..."
"I'm telling Mommy," Nalda angrily announced, springing to her feet and stomping toward the doorway, her two clones predictably scrambling into action behind her.
"G'ahead," he casually counter-threatened in a wholly unconcerned manner. "I'll just tell Santa..."
The screeching of brakes could almost be heard as his words brought the triplets to a frozen halt in their tracks.
"Tell him what?" Nalda turned and cautiously called his bluff.
"I'll tell him you snitched on your father," he informed her, despite the fact that he hadn't even told a falsehood. Santa's violation of airspace was completely true in that one of national networks had earlier reported it under the auspices of a tongue-in-cheek public interest story. "Santa's not too crazy about stool pigeons, y'know," he thought it only fair to include in the record. "I wouldn't be counting too much on finding that bicycle under the tree..."
"You can't tell him anything, Daddy," Nalda counter-countered after mulling his threat over for a moment. "He only comes down the chimney when everybody's asleep," she hated to remind him, confidently turning and resuming her march toward the doorway.
"Yeah, well... I happen to know Santa personally," he cavalierly mentioned in a low, easy voice. "I'm sure he'll take my call," he added, chuckling inside at the volume of the gasp that subsequently leapt from Riley's throat.
"Thanta?" she breathlessly repeated, her eyes bulging with a blend of shock, confusion, and outright fear.
"Uh-huh," he casually confirmed, as though it were nothing, really. "I know a lot of important people," he factually stated, patting the cell phone inside his pocket, leaving them to contemplate the unthinkable: that a hotline might really, actually, indeed exist between their father and Santa Claus — Santa, whose supernatural powers were second only to God's.
He quietly watched from the corner of his eye as The Pack exchanged stunned, silent glances and telepathic notes.
"Does Mommy know Santa, too?" Nalda suspiciously delved, requiring a bit more information before buying into a claim of such magnitude.
"No, she couldn't come along," he responded. "She had to stay home and watch you guys while I went to the North Pole to get this one," he explained, pointing a finger at Riley, whose forearms he had to then quickly grasp to keep her from toppling onto the floor.
Jaws dropped. Mouths went dry. Eyes tripled in size. It was true; their father did know a lot of important people. Their grandfather had told them so, and their own mother had confirmed it.
"I was there?" Riley sputtered in stunned disbelief.
"You were the reason I had to go up there in the first place," her father clarified. "You were just a baby... your first Christmas. And it was late at night, and I was feeding you a bottle right here — leaning right here, against the couch — and we both fell asleep, and..."
He paused to bite the inside of cheek to keep from laughing as The Pack slowly began creeping forward, with pale-white faces, inching their way closer so not to miss a word of the details.
"...and, uhh..."
"What, Daddy?" Georgia all but yelled at him, her Dessler-inherited inner-need-to-know mechanism on the verge of blowing a gasket as she dropped to her knees beside him, hands leaning against his shoulder, prepared to shake him silly should his memory require jolting.
To think that their own father knew Santa Claus personally — Santa, who possessed the awesome ability to see and hear and know if a person was being naughty or nice at any given point in time, which ultimately had a direct bearing on whether one received the toys they had asked him for, or the dreaded lump of coal in their stocking. To think that their own father had been to the North Pole; that he had actually seen the inside of Santa's house; that he'd likely met Mrs. Santa Claus, too, and possibly even the elves.
"...and... well, this one must've woken up and crawled off my chest into Santa's bag," he continued, throwing a little shock-and-horror-of-it-all into his tone, for added effect, consequently drawing a collective gasp from The Pack, now gathered tightly around him. "Your mother was furious with me..." he recalled, shaking his head at the memory. "It had to be two, three days before she could speak to me without yelling..."
"Then what, Daddy?" Laura squealed, barely in control of her voice.
"Well, your mother insisted I go up there and get her, of course," he reminisced, then suddenly frowned and paused for a torturously long period of time. "Y'know... I could really go for a cookie right about now," he decided, lifting his head from the couch pillow as if preparing to leave.
"I'll get it!" Nalda volunteered, making a dash for the kitchen and returning at record speed with the bag of Oreos he kept hidden in the back of one of the lower cabinets.
Grimacing with the knowledge that his secret stash had obviously been compromised, he thanked her anyway and crunched down on the cookie she had carefully placed inside his mouth, taking another quiet moment for himself, this time to savor the flavor.
"Did you drive there?" Georgia impatiently broke the tension-filled silence.
"Of course not," he frowned, looking at her like she had two heads, then pausing for another interminably long time while he repositioned himself into more of a semi-seated slump so as not to choke on the next two cookies he then proceeded to shove into his mouth. "Too much snow... Had to requisition a chopper," he mumbled in between crunches, "which cost the taxpayer a pretty penny, I'll have you know," he turned and frowned directly at Riley, who didn't appear to have blinked once since the last time he'd glanced at her paralyzed face.
Tiny bodies moved closer and frail little arms encircled his neck from every direction as he went on to explain how much trouble he and the pilot had run into that night, trying to locate the candy cane-looking pole sticking out of the snow, and with no help from the chopper's instrument panel, which had begun to freeze up from the bitter cold; how relieved they were when they'd finally spotted the pole, with a sign hanging from it, pointed in the direction of a singular light source glowing off in the dark distance.
"Santa's the only one who lives up there, y'know, so once ya see the light, it's a pretty safe bet that you've got the right place," he elaborated to a sea of bouncing, bobbing curls, all nodding in understanding and agreement. "So I knock on the door, and who answers but Santa himself..."
A collective gasp filled the room. Riley slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream.
"Was he in his bajambas?" Laura, a stickler for details, was dying to know.
"Nah, he hadn't changed into them yet... Oh, he was plenty tired, all right. Don't get me wrong. He'd just gotten home from delivering toys all over the world, after all... And coal," he added for his own personal entertainment, noting a look of alarm immediately radiate from Nalda's eyes. "But the elves had found Riley asleep in the empty bag when they were putting the sleigh and the reindeer away, and carried her up to the house. So when I got there, Santa and Mrs. Claus were still up, feeding her a bottle," he reported with squinted eyes, as though straining to accurately recall all the fine particulars. "And, boy, was Santa happy to see me... Saved him a trip all the way back here..."
He paused to casually stuff another two Oreos into his mouth, taking a moment to covertly glance at Riley to ensure that she was still breathing normally.
"Aelf carried Riley?" Georgia breathlessly double-checked, certain that her ears had to be deceiving her.
"Well, it took two of them, actually. You remember how chubby she was when she was a baby... Remember those cheeks?" he grinned, raising a gale of squeals and laughter, the loudest of all emanating from Riley, herself, as her father grabbed a handful of her baby fat, elaborating on the amount of milk that Mrs. Santa Claus had to feed her before she finally dropped off to sleep again that night.
In the basement below, Michelle smiled up toward the ceiling from amidst a mountain of toys and wrapping paper and ribbon, hard-pressed to imagine a sound more precious or joyous than her babies' squeals of laughter, provoked by the man they all adored. She didn't know which richly embellished — if not altogether fabricated — tale he was telling them this time, but whatever it was, she would back up his every word, as she always did, when they repeated the story to her in the morning, after their perfectly wrapped gifts had all been frantically ripped open.
They would love the pink Princess Pedal Cars that their father had had the wisdom to purchase as backups to their Barbie bikes, intuitively knowing that they weren't quite ready to move up to training wheels just yet, no matter how much they'd insisted otherwise through the months and weeks leading up to Christmas. And Riley would adore her pink roadster-style pedal car, particularly because it wasn't the exact same model as her sisters' cars. It was distinctly different, with a great look and personality all its own. Like Riley.
Her husband would love the four tiny silver angel charms she had attached to the buckle of the watch he always wore to work. She'd had the jeweler engrave the initial of a daughter on the back of each of the charms, which were so miniscule in size that no one was likely to ever notice them. But he would always know they were there.
She, herself, would love the pearls he had gotten her, which she couldn't help but sneak a peek at earlier in the week, jimmying open the top-left desk drawer where he had safely locked them away. But her favorite gift this year would be the one that was transpiring right now: the memories that were being made as she lived and breathed and wrapped, which she and her husband and their babies would carry with them throughout their lives, of yet another perfect Almeida night-before-Christmas.